“Say… isn’t she late?”
Staring at the empty bottle, Arc turned to the subordinate seated beside him.
Kasumireaz, who had likewise finished eating and was tipping his silver goblet, froze mid-motion. His eyes were on the bottle in Arc’s hand—one that had only just been opened when Masumi left their table.
Arc and Kasumireaz could both hold their liquor.
Even so, unless someone was trying to outdrink the other, it took at least a quarter hour to finish a full bottle. For “sobering up,” it was simply too long.
“Now that you mention it, yes. She didn’t look that far gone.”
“Don’t tell me someone’s pestering her again.”
Arc craned his neck, scanning the chaotic banquet.
Everywhere he looked, there were drunks. Men standing and clinking cups, men sitting and locking arms—knights and townsfolk tangled together in the very definition of a riotous revel.
It was an annual sight.
But within the range of his eye, every cluster still held faces he recognized among his men. It didn’t look as though an entire group of knights had vanished. The “musician snatching war” Kasumireaz had reported earlier seemed, for the moment, to have settled.
The deterrent of the captain of the guard’s punishment appeared to be working.
Still, even if no knight had cornered her, she might be getting crushed by civilians.
A musician with that kind of skill had been rare in recent years. Arc’s eyes softened as the memory of the knighting ceremony rose before him. That mixture of shock and envy in the crowd’s stare—she surely hadn’t noticed it.
Such talent, and yet she wasn’t haughty. If anything, she was careless. Almost cheerful.
“If she’s gotten lost, that’s a pain. I’ll go find her.”
With a weary sigh, breathing out warm from the drink, Arc set his cup down.
But as he began to rise, Kasumireaz stopped him. When Arc looked down at the voice calling his name, the captain of the guard was there, staring hard at a single point in the air with unblinking focus.
“That.”
Kasumireaz pointed past the countless light-spheres, into the pitch-black night beyond.
Amid the stars, there was a single point of rose-colored flame. Even as they narrowed their eyes to track it, it slowly grew larger. Its course was unmistakable: it was headed straight for the fortress.
Arc and Kasumireaz exchanged a look.
Then both let out the same deep sigh. This year, of all years—why did troubles keep coming without pause?
“What do we do?”
“…I don’t want to cause a scene. We’ll meet it from the rear.”
“Understood. Let us go.”
Without a trace of drunkenness, Kasumireaz swept his white cloak around him.
They left the old training ground that served as the banquet venue and hurried through the fortress’s stone corridors.
The old training ground lay along the outer edge of the fort. There were other open areas nearer the center, but taking every precaution, the two headed for the old riding field on the opposite side—far from the revel.
They ran down the great central staircase. Along the corridor encircling the training ground, a few civilians still wandered, but by the time they reached this area there was no one at all. No shouted greetings. No hands on their sleeves. With the nuisance gone, their pace naturally quickened.
They descended the equivalent of three floors, then emerged back outside.
A stone-paved covered walkway stretched on for a short distance. When it ended, the old riding field came into view, and only then did the two slow their steps.
Each time their boots sank into the ground, a rough rasp answered. Once, the surface had been soft sand for horses, but now, with no one left to tend it, it had hardened into packed earth.
From the center of the field, they looked up. The rose-colored flame had grown to the size of a thumbnail.
“Shall I cast a defensive barrier over the fortress, just in case?”
“If you do, the moment it goes up everyone will know something’s wrong.”
Arc wanted to. More than he wanted to admit. With Kasumireaz’s power, it wasn’t impossible. After all, the very barrier stretched over all of Vestofa had been raised by this man beside him.
But it wouldn’t do.
The magic Kasumireaz carried—received through Arc’s knighting—manifested as blue. It was the same for the others, differing only in shade, but Kasumireaz’s scale was in a class of its own. To protect an entire fortress at once… without bringing in the highest-ranked holy knights, only Arc or Kasumireaz could accomplish such a thing.
And if those two moved, it meant the situation was urgent.
The instant a blue barrier wrapped the fortress, the banquet would be halted, the knights would go on alert, and the civilians would panic. The celebration they had finally restored would be ruined.
They were here for less than ten days.
The purpose was the knighting ceremony, yes—but it was also the once-a-year festival. Arc had no desire to pour any more cold water on it.
“Let’s watch it first. If it looks dangerous, we’ll shoot it down.”
“Either way, that will still cause a stir.”
Kasumireaz’s voice held quiet resignation as he watched the rose-colored flame grow larger still.
They fell silent, studying the flame’s motion. By the time it was clearly identifiable to the naked eye as a messenger firebird, they had also confirmed its path.
Straight for the riding field.
Once Arc had judged it was not a hostile magical beast, he let the power pooling in his palm disperse. Pale blue-white strands split and dissolved into the night.
“…Well. I shouldn’t have any acquaintances with rose-colored magic.”
As the firebird drifted down into the center of the field, Arc rubbed his chin.
When one needed to send word far away in haste, it was possible to create a familiar—a messenger born from one’s own magic—to act as courier. For an “Ember,” it was effortless; for a “Spark,” it was within reach as well, so long as they were not newly made trainee knights. Anyone with proper training—junior knights, full knights, true knights—could manage it. Holy knights, of course, were no exception.
The color, however, was telling.
Every “Ember” possessed a unique hue, and a “Spark” would manifest within that same family of color, darker or lighter. Because of that, one could usually identify who was reaching out simply by the familiar’s color—
But Arc’s memory held no one with rose-colored power.
Active knight-order commanders—Arc’s uncles and brothers—ran the gamut from violet to green, but they were all cool-toned.
The mages’ leaders tended toward warm colors, but those were usually bright oranges or yellows; reds were rare these days, and anything near rose rarer still.
If there were to be a succession, the successor would be someone Arc already knew. Yet even when he ran through the candidates in his mind, none matched this hue. And there had been no talk of any changing of the guard in either the knight orders or the mages.
Meaning: this contact was from an unknown party.
And most likely, not someone from Albarique at all.
“I’ll take your message.”
Arc held out his hand to the firebird. At once, it flared, its shape breaking apart into sparks that scattered through the air. When the last rose flame vanished, a small slip of paper lay in Arc’s palm.
He lowered his eyes to the few lines written there.
Silence.
Then a sigh.
“Honestly. She has the worst luck—or the timing is simply too perfect.”
A face rose in his mind: stubborn, bristling with pride, yet always carefully measuring the distance between herself and others.
The day before the ceremony, she had somehow managed the bold feat of trespassing on a provincial knight garrison. And yet she had understood nothing of how serious it was.
She’d pushed through an injured leg—he had applied healing, but still—fulfilled her role in the ceremony, been swarmed by low-ranking knights, witnessed the sweeping of an entire horde of wolves in an operation few ever saw. Then, just as things seemed to settle, she’d run into another magical-beast incident in the city—and now, at last, after sitting down to breathe, she’d been kidnapped.
Her draw was absurdly strong.
Arc couldn’t think of any kinder way to phrase it. He had never met anyone who attracted trouble so relentlessly.
He let out a short laugh through his nose.
Kasumireaz looked to him in question, so Arc flicked the letter—no, the threat—into the air toward him.
“Probably a spy from Raytea. This time, it looks like the real thing.”
“The real thing? …‘If you want the musician returned in one piece, send the Supreme Commander alone.’ I see. A refreshingly straightforward threat.”
“If they found out the ‘hostage’ they grabbed has a spy suspicion hanging over her, I wonder what face they’d make.”
“They would likely feel… conflicted.”
“Right?”
Arc couldn’t quite hold the laughter back.
If the musician they’d seized at just the right moment turned out to be a stand-in—a stopgap replacement—how would the blackmailer react?
Masumi didn’t strike him as the type for careful bargaining. She might, with total sincerity, announce, “Wrong person,” straight to their face and throw them into confusion. That sounded exactly like her.
But they didn’t have much time.
Even if the absurdity of “stand-in” made the kidnapper hesitate to fly into a rage, it was still far too optimistic to assume Masumi would remain untouched.
“I will have the Fourth Lance begin the search. If we start with the city and expand the detection outward, it should not take long.”
“No. You go alone and crush them. I’ll cast the detection across the whole area.”
“I do not mind, but… may I ask why?”
Arc’s mouth curled.
“They’ve likely researched our strength. We only brought thirty men—an ad hoc force. They’ll assume the search party will be mid-tier full knights, at best a Banaret-class— a company commander among the true knights.”
“You intend to take them by surprise.”
Arc didn’t answer aloud. His grin sharpened.
“We were the ones deceived first. It’s only polite to return the courtesy properly.”
“…Then there is no doubt the tracking mark was placed.”
Kasumireaz said it evenly, without surprise.
As expected—he was quick. The title of captain of the guard with the highest magical reserves in history was not for show.
“The beast incident in the city was probably a diversion. The only time I left her side was then.”
“Clever. It seems the mark itself was masked as well.”
“Yeah. That part… I’ll admit I got careless.”
With a guilty scowl, Arc raked his fingers roughly through his hair.
To be honest, he had never expected his guard to drop for even an instant.
When the commotion began, he had felt something was off.
After the wolves incident the day before, Vestofa was now covered by an unusually robust barrier. Kasumireaz had raised it—an extraordinary strength. It blocked magical beasts, and it also detected anything trying to force its way into the city.
Slipping through it would require a highly sophisticated technique.
Could an ordinary spy manage that? The doubt had gnawed at him.
But the fight with the iglus pushed that unease to the back of his mind. When he returned to Masumi, she was waiting exactly where he’d left her, and she didn’t mention speaking with anyone.
A tracking mark he should have noticed, if only he’d looked.
Most likely it had been placed deliberately in the jostling crowd, when she collided with someone. Distracted by the panic, both Arc and Kasumireaz had focused only on each other’s safety and failed to notice the mark—exactly as the enemy intended. Kasumireaz, too, had never imagined Arc himself would be caught off guard, and so he missed it as well.
For the blackmailer, it must have been easy.
Track the target’s movement, wait for the moment she was alone, then strike. Between a trained spy and a musician with no physical enhancement at all, the outcome was obvious.
It was meticulous.
And the circumstantial evidence spoke loudly: not only might the spy be skilled, it would be no surprise if a high-ranking caster were involved as well.
In the shadows behind it all, the neighboring country of Raytea loomed.
“I could go as instructed and meet them myself,” Arc said, his smile still in place. “But if I misjudge my restraint, I’ll kill them.”
“It is reassuring to know you still possess your last shred of reason.”
“Hmph. Go deal with it before the blood vessel in my head pops.”
As he spoke, Arc gathered magic in both hands. To cast detection over all of Vestofa, he would need a respectable amount—about the output of two holy knights. With that much, probing a provincial city was nothing.
A challenge flung down like a gauntlet.
Fine, then. He would accept it—and return it fivefold.
Masumi might be a stand-in, but Arc had no intention of letting this end here.
Touch what was his, and you learned exactly what happened. The kind of fool who laid hands on her needed the lesson carved into their body.
If peaceful negotiation had ever been an option, it was the enemy who had thrown it away first.
